【Japan】

A florist is Japanbeautifying New York City, one flower at a time.

If big, beautiful bouquets of flowers emerging from trash cans have stopped you in your tracks while wandering around NYC, you've come across the work of Lewis Miller.

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Miller, a wedding and party florist, has been dazzling onlookers by placing surprise flower arrangements in the most unlikely of places. Miller told Voguethat the only purpose of these "Flower Flashes," as he calls them, is to bring joy to his fellow citizens on their daily commutes.

“Gifting flowers to New Yorkers is a simple idea that I have been thinking about for years,” Miller said. “I am in the business of fantasy and flowers, and it’s my job to transform key moments in my clients’ lives into joyful, everlasting memories. I wanted to recreate a similar feeling for the everyday city-dwellers and tourists of New York City.”

Lewis has laid his arrangements everywhere from on the top of famous statues to city streets. In honor of the Met Ball, he adorned the Crosby Street Hotel cat with a purple mohawk to give the feline a punk rock feel.

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“My team and I work really fast and very early in the a.m," he said of how this work of floral magic is performed. "Our call time for these flashes is 5:45 a.m., and we try to finish them before sunrise. We always recycle flowers from events when possible.”

Miller explains on his Instagram that to arrange his installation at John Lennon's memorial in Central Park, he and his team woke up before sunrise to write a flower message in the dark. This project came before the 2016 election, and urged all that observed to go out and make a difference.

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When he outlined the Imagine mosaic in Central Park for his first project, he was surprised with how quickly a crowd formed around him and his team.

"In this age of social media, we saw the fruits of our labor and were instantly rewarded via Instagram," he said. "We got to see how our idea translated in real time with hundreds of selflies and photographs documenting the flowers throughout the course of the day. It was really cool to see how people changed and altered the installation, sometimes by rearranging the flowers, other times by simply taking them!”

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Some of his other floral pop-up displays include his LOVE sculpture project, decorating the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and of course, sprucing up NYC's wire trash cans.

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Miller never broadcasts where his next work of art will be. However, the team does chalk spray the hashtag "LMD x NYC" by each installation as a way of tagging their presence.

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As for what's next, well, that's a secret.

“I can’t tell you what’s next, but I can reveal that we are thinking bigger and planning for that! I would love to get some funding to do these flashes on a much larger scale and reach a lot more New Yorkers," he said." I’d also like to Flower Flash other cities. Chicago, Mexico City, Miami, Los Angeles . . . they are all on my list.”

But Miller's ultimate goal will always be to bring beauty, brightness, and joy to all New Yorkers.

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If this is the only way to get New Yorkers to stop and smell the flowers, it sure is working.

[H/T: Vogue]